Twin Creek Gardens, CSA

Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Gardens, CSA.

00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Garden CSA. Good morning, Beth. How are you today? Good morning. In this beautiful snowy weather, I am wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, have you guys not had a lot of snow this winter? No, it was crazy. Everything was awake. My gardens were beginning to bud, and now we just got a pile, I think almost 17.

00:29 18 inches in the last three days. So I'm a little worried about my lilacs and my other little bushes out there, my blueberries, but hopefully they'll be protected and they'll come through it anyway. This is the first... You're in Superior? Yeah, we're south of Superior, about 10 miles. This is the first big snow we've had all year. Yeah, it feels like Christmas.

00:56 Yeah, we were supposed to get six inches to a foot in this same storm that you guys are getting in Wisconsin. And we ended up with only like a couple inches here. Oh. So I don't know what happened to our Christmas snowstorm. It didn't happen. I'm kind of glad because we were in the same boat as you. Our maple tree has started to flower out and we had onion sprouting and stuff. So I don't know.

01:24 Anyway, tell me about yourself and Twin Creek Gardens, CSA. Well, this is kind of amazing because this is a long dream, long time dream come true in a short amount of time. I actually, for 34 years, was a classroom teacher and a reading specialist in particular. And in working with kids and with literacy and with writing and reading, I always had, you know,

01:54 the desire to have them learn more about who they are as people through what they were reading and writing, not just the ability to read and write. And so my passion for gardening and my love for people and helping the world become a better place, my son calls me the biggest liberal hippie in the world, which I wear as a badge of honor, by the way. You know, and so I've always had this desire to.

02:24 help others find their goal, or reach their goals and find their path to the healthiest life, the best life that they could have. And so I've been having kids listen to podcasts and watch videos in middle school and then write about how that affects them in their thinking and their process of who they wanna become and that kind of thing. And so CSAs have been...

02:51 Um, not very prevalent up here, but I love the idea because my father has always had a garden when I was young, I grew up digging in the dirt. My favorite thing of, of gardening was always the, the digging of the potatoes in October because I knew we were putting the garden to bed then, you know? And so, um, you know, I grew up south of Superior here, just about five miles from where I live right now. And my sweet husband grew up about.

03:19 mile and a half from this house, and we grew up together. We were 10 when we met, and we both loved gardens, we both loved horses, and nature, and just being, we're both country kids, let's put it that way. And we grew up and went our separate ways when you go to school in Superior. If you go to the Catholic school, you kind of lose touch with your friends from the country school.

03:44 And at least that's how it was. And so he went one way, I went the other. And then we met back at high school. We hardly had any friends in common, so we kind of went our separate paths. But he and his first wife loved gardening as well and raised three children in various country homes doing gardening and raising horses. And they had cows for a while. And so very much a farm family.

04:14 after college moved down to the Green Bay, Manitowoc area where I married and had my son. And then when my marriage fell apart, I came running home to the northern woods of Wisconsin. And my parents were still here in Paterson Park at that time. And so cable is where I landed because the school that I found that needed me was Drummond.

04:44 which all these sweet little towns up here are just, it's like going back in time. It's such a beautiful, fresh air. I'll never forget when I came home to do the interview in Drummond and I got out of the car, the air smelled different. I left Green Bay and the big city area, I came home and the trees up here, the air up here, I knew I had to come home.

05:13 We had a kind of randomly meandering here, but we had a school garden at Drummond that I helped organize and participate in. It was actually a high tunnel. And so I fell in love with that kind of gardening because it extended our season so nicely. And so that's kind of building blocks. My cable house had a third of an acre right in town.

05:42 I had a ring of cedar trees around my yard and so gardening in ground was really n